AMD Athlon X2 7750 Review

Introduction:

There has been so much hype around the quad-core market that you hear very little about other CPUs. AMD, while releasing and perfecting their Phenom line of processors, have also been developing the new Athlon X2 series in the background. After releasing the quad-core Phenom, AMD shocked us with the release of the first triple-core processor designed to take on the Core 2 Duo market, offering better performance for less money. Now AMD has taken everything they learned with the Phenom series and built on it for the AMD Athlon X2. The Athlon X2 Series offers some of the same features as the past Athlon X2 series processors, but adds new ones, like an L3 Cache, HyperTransport 3.0 and a max TDP of 95 watts.

Today we are going to take a look at the AMD Athlon X2 7750 which is clocked at 2.70GHz (200 x 13.5) and is a Black Edition with an unlocked multiplier. The Athlon X2 7750 has 2 x 512KB of L2 Cache and 2MB shared of L3 Cache. The new versions of the Athlon X2 now run on a HyperTransport 3.0 bus, which for the X2 7750, with an HT speed of 1800MHz gives you a maximum 3,600MTs or 7,200MBs. The X2 7750 also features a maximum TDP of 95 watts. What is TDP you ask? It stands for thermal design power, and according to AMD it is the maximum amount of power the CPU will draw and dissipate under normal operating conditions. So do I have your interest peaked yet? Well, I know mine is, so how about we move on and take a look at the CPU up close and personal? Bring on the Kuma.

Closer Look:

The AMD Athlon X2 7750 came to us OEM style in sample packaging, not the retail box with fan that you would get if you bought it from a retailer. To protect the processor and the sensitive pins it was placed in a black hard plastic case with foam inside, which kept it nice and safe on its journey from Austin, Texas to my home. It traveled over 1200 miles on two flights right to my test bed for all of you to see.

You will notice that this processor looks exactly like the Phenom with the exception of the branding name. It is a socket AM2+ processor which uses a 940-pin socket. It can also be placed into and AM2 motherboard with reduced functionality, such as a HyperTransport drop down to the boards specification, such as HyperTransport 2.0 in most cases.

Now that we have gotten a look at the goodies we can move on to testing it out.